I have experienced the same problem. I've setup my VM to use the "Client Device" as its CD/DVD. When I go to connect my CD/DVD after powering up the VM I get an error dialog of “Could not open the client device E: it is being used by another virtual machine or some other program.” The only thing running on this new computer is ESXi 5.0 I’ve just loaded up ESXi on this box and am trying to load my first VM off of a MS Server 2003 media. I tried a ROCKS boot cd as well on a twin of this system with the same result.

I’ve also set the VM’s BIOS boot order to hit CD first as well as a 15,000 ms delay on boot to give time to hit the CD Tool and attach the physical CD/DVD drive. That all doesn’t matter because no matter what I do I get the same in use error. Help? Ideas?

I was able to use my local PC CD-ROM by just changing that simple setting under the VM.

VM -> Edit Settings -> CD/DVD Drive 1 -> Emulate IDE

What I dislike about VMware ESXI a lot is that when I have to perform a new install of an OS I do not have the appropriate time to let the VM boot, me mounting the CD-ROM, and letting the VM bios find the CD-ROM. I always have to edit settings and delay boot of about 5000 ms.

I find the best way to do it is tick the boot-into-bios option. Once it's sitting at the bios, I can connect up the drive and exit out of the bios to continue booting. It's a one-off option so you don't need to go back into the settings to untick it..

I had a similar issue today trying to build a brand new VM with Win 2008 Server r2 64bit. My cd wouldn't boot. Here's what I did to make it work.

Download or create an ISO from my Windows 08 Server media. Place the ISO file on a network share in a folder with rights for the user. Right Click the VM & choose edit settings ---- click CD|DVD --- place a check @ "connect on power" on and "connected" ---- select "Datastore ISO File" ----- then click browse and select your ISO file ---or--you could probalby place a UNC path \\server\share\myfile.ISO in the Datastore field.

Also, I selected to force the vm to go into the BIOS on first startup, and I made sure that the CD-DVD was the first bootable device in the BIOS.....Escaped from BIOS and my machine booted right into Windows 2008 Server setup and has been running all day.... Hope this helps.

This is exactly what I did. One thing I’ve tried to do and failed at since is getting my 2008 SR2 server to have a Unix share that is accessible by this process. I’d love to have a Unix share on the box that I can drop to the share from my Windows server and then be able to connect to the Unix share from the drive redirector when I’m configuring VMs on different boxes. I’ve got to where I can see the ISO’s in my NFS share but can’t read them! Bother… You would have any idea on how to create an NFS share on Sever 2008 R2 that I can do this with would you?